RIP
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What does that mean?
I always go to specific recipes from Google rather than using the site navigation so the redesign doesn’t make any difference to me.
Evidently they got bought out by Relish, redesigned the front page, and nuked user comments.
Oh. Not sure how that’s similar to Chowhound, which is mostly made of comments. More like Eater.
They got bought out and took a dump on their site infuriating their core user base. Aka pulled a chow hound.
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Ah. But who “took a dump” on the site? Is the site worse (like @robert, I never go to the homepage)? Or did the comments get toxic after the redesign?
Staffer says not much has changed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/seriouseats/comments/kc4bq4/serious_eats_has_been_sold_now_what/gfph52b/
It’s pretty bad. It’s an apt comparison imo.
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I see. Well, I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing - getting to SE via a google recipe search and never looking around the site at all.
I see no similarity to CBS’s reorganization of Chowhound. They broke things so I can’t find posts I know were there, not even using Google. I don’t know if they were deleted or just somehow made unfindable.
What do you think is missing from Serious Eats?
I don’t know about Chowhound but some of the redesigns from Serious Eats are bad enough I’m thinking of not using it any more after about 7 years of almost daily visits.
My main complaints are:
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The comments do remain on recipes only (not articles) but they’re weirdly moderated. I’ve put non-critical, completely normal comments on that never show up. These weren’t old recipes that languish in their archive, these were either new or recently featured recipes.
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The original publishing date of a recipe/article was replaced with the most recent update. On the face of it that doesn’t seem too bad but it seems like almost all the recipes have been updated around 2018 or thereabouts for things like metric measurements rather than substantial changes to the recipe so you can’t really tell when a recipe was published. The publishing date was something I checked every time I used a recipe because quality (very generally) improved over time so there are early recipes that are pretty terrible that are now hard to distinguish from more recent recipes. For example, I’d take Kenji recipes from before 2014 with a big grain of salt as opposed to articles after that point.
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They had/have a section labelled “Our latest” that’s not currently on the homepage where they ostensibly posted their newest recipes but in fact they post “updated” recipes to it that (again) have no substantial changes from the original publishing. The past week they did this with two Thai recipes that were actually published a year or so ago.
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There might be a moderation backlog due to their being shortstaffed.
I posted a comment last month and it’s there.
Maybe but I posted a comment on a “new” updated article six days ago that’s still pending. If that’s the speed by which they moderate comments then it’s hardly a viable system
Once the redesign is completed they shouldn’t be as shorthanded.
My last comment was posted 25 days ago. I don’t know how long it was pending moderation.
Okay I guess we’ll see how it shakes out re: comments. Still doesn’t address the other two bullet points and those feel enough like bad faith changes I don’t really trust them to do right by the comments, either.
Huh, just noticed that this recipe for mashed potatoes has a specific note on original publishing date and the update.
That actually goes beyond addressing my complaint re: removing the publishing date but after checking a few adjacent recipes on the site this doesn’t appear to be a common note. Also, it doesn’t seem to be findable using Command/Control F (below) so you can only find it if 1) it exists on the page, 2) you scroll and search for it specifically.
EDIT: After poking through a few recipes I see that when the original publishing date appears it’s usually just above the recipe as in this recipe and this recipe. I still wish this note were on all the recipes (which seems like an easy and intuitive fix) but given where they appear on the page you can just hit the “Jump to Recipe” button and scroll up a little to check.
I know this is a very specific complaint but Serious Eats frequently takes a while to load on a few computers I’ve used so trying to visually find something on the page that may not exist is not optimal for me.
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So is Kenji still involved with them? I know he’s moved to Seattle.
He publishes over there occasionally, but not often at all.